The point is we are who we are and we get what we get. Most of it is not our choice. Most of it is the luck of the draw.
Then, if that’s accurate, and no matter how you slice it, it seems accurate to me, the bottom line is: what makes us who we are is what we do with what we get.
We get what we get. We know what we know. We do what we do.
And so it goes.
But of course there’s so much more.
So on top of being a first generation immigrant from Hungary, my father was born poor, dirt poor is the old expression. He was an Orthodox Jew born to a very learned father whom I never met. He was Orthodox until he went into the service. He was dealt the depression and left school in eighth grade to go to work to help support his family.
He got what he got.
Then came the war. He did what he did. Like so many other true Americans, he enlisted and went to that war. In between, he met my mother. That’s a whole other story for another time. Short version for here and now is that his sister married my maternal grandmother’s brother (or my aunt on my father’s side was married to my great uncle on my mother’s side) and somewhere in there my father and mother met, and for whatever else there was, in 1942 they married before he went overseas.
And so it goes.
Although my mother had the still-born twin and two miscarriages physically, my father got them as well, as well as the sickly baby deemed not likely to survive, but who did survive, and then later the baby with the lazy eye, me.
We all got what we got.
It was different back then. And this is important to understanding how it is now. Back then, and we’re not talking so long ago, only about roughly seventy years, and really all the time before then too, people had a work ethic. I’m not talking about whether or not they wanted to work or if they liked working. I’m talking about a work ethic, plain and simple. Life was simple. You went to school, you graduated (or not) and you went to work. A few people back then went to college and became professionals. You were taught as a matter of fact that there was no such thing as a free ride.
As a point of history, welfare in the US starts during the Great Depression in the 1930s. But welfare as we know it today, where a person who is not elderly or disabled can receive aid from the federal government, does not start until the 1960s, after the Great Society Legislation passed by LBJ in 1964-5, right after and in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy.
And by the way, as a pure aside, LBJ was probably more crass and vulgar than Donald Trump, but he was a Democrat so… And JFK purportedly had more than 500 women while he was in the White House, but he was a Democrat too, so…
Anyway, it was different back then. Back then you might have bitched about it, but no one was helping you in any way, so you went to work. As a parent, you taught your kids that no one was going to give you anything and nothing is free. You were taught that after you were done with school you had to go to work.
It is what it is and that’s what it was.
More. You were taught to be a responsible person and a responsible citizen. You were taught to learn to take care of yourself and be responsible for doing just that, and you were taught to be proud of being able to do that. You were taught to take pride in who you were, but more, you were taught to be responsible for who you are.
That was then, and now, except for our older generation, people like me, then is gone and if the Democrats have their way, they will make sure it is dead, wholly gone, and they will bury it forever and all of us too.
And so it goes.
(To be continued)
